Guy Stephens

The following is a brief talk I gave at the MRS Annual Conference 2013 – Shock of the New (20.03.13).

What I’d like to explore briefly today is an idea put forward by IBM’s Chairman and CEO, Ginny Rometti. In a recent address she gave at the Council on Foreign Relations, Ginny talked about three principles:

• The first one: data will change how you make decisions
• The second, data will change how you create value
• And the third, data will change how you deliver value

And she gave three seemingly unconnected examples to illustrate these principles.

• The first one — a police department reduces the incident of rape by moving payphones inside of a convenience store
• Second one — a Mexican cement maker, CEMEX, launches its first global product in record time not by building a...

Someone told me we’re all social now.

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Twitter – check

Facebook – check

WordPress – check / Tumblr – no

FourSquare – check / Gowalla – check (is it still going?)

Google – check

LinkedIn – check (even got a First Million badge, must be a real pioneer!)

Posterous – check (ok not very often)

Klout score – check / Kred score – check / PeerIndex – check (just to complete the triumvirate)

Bit.ly account – check

#hashtags – check

Friendfeed – used to (who remembers Friendfeed. I liked Friendfeed, I think it’s still going)

Delicious – check

Instagram – check (but don’t tell anyone)

Flickr – check (but don’t tell anyone)

EyeEm – check (ok, so I haven’t posted a photo yet)

Lively.fm – check / Spotify – check / last.fm – check / Grooveshark – check

Yammer – check (an old friend)

IBM Connections – check

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The following post originally appeared on Capgemini’s Customer Experience blog which I write for occassionally.

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I’m reading a lot of blogs, whitepapers and articles about the ‘age of digital disruption’ at the moment.

Disruption as a negative force, signalling some kind of necessary shift away from what has come before it: old business models becoming increasingly irrelevant, old ways of communicating becoming increasingly ineffective, old systems too slow to cope. The old ways are simply, well, in a word ‘old’.

The system as we know it, as we are led to believe, is unresponsive, slow, encumbered, weighed down, broken. The weight of the past hangs heavy. We cling on to our industrial heritage, only beginning to let go, once we (willingly or unwillingly) realise the old ways can no longer keep out the pace of the...

I’m spending an increasing amount of time at the moment thinking about enterprise social networks (ESN) and the internal workings of organisations. There is no doubt that ESNs are challenging and changing the way we work, how we make decisions, the speed with which knowledge is distributed, found, created, the distinctions between private and public, the impact they are having on organisational hierarchies. ESNs challenge models and ways of doing things that have evolved over the last few decades. They seek to undo, undermine, create uncertainty.

Clay Shirky writes: When we change the way we communicate, we change society.

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I was reading a great post the other day by Caterina Fake – How to be Free: Proustian Memory and the Palest Ink. The post was about how Fake...